Deep Learning-based Dual Watermarking for Image Copyright Protection and Authentication

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel deep learning-based dual watermarking method for images that ensures copyright protection and authenticity, demonstrating robustness against manipulations and achieving high accuracy and minimal image distortion.

Contribution

It presents the first deep learning-based dual watermarking technique that combines cryptographic and perceptual hashes for secure and robust image copyright protection and authentication.

Findings

High PSNR and SSIM indicate minimal image distortion.

High watermark extraction accuracy achieved.

Robustness against content-preserving manipulations demonstrated.

Abstract

Advancements in digital technologies make it easy to modify the content of digital images. Hence, ensuring digital images integrity and authenticity is necessary to protect them against various attacks that manipulate them. We present a Deep Learning (DL) based dual invisible watermarking technique for performing source authentication, content authentication, and protecting digital content copyright of images sent over the internet. Beyond securing images, the proposed technique demonstrates robustness to content-preserving image manipulations. It is also impossible to imitate or overwrite watermarks because the cryptographic hash of the image and the dominant features of the image in the form of perceptual hash are used as watermarks. We highlighted the need for source authentication to safeguard image integrity and authenticity, along with identifying similar content for copyright protection. After exhaustive testing, we obtained a high peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity index measure (SSIM), which implies there is a minute change in the original image after embedding our watermarks. Our trained model achieves high watermark extraction accuracy and to the best of our knowledge, this is the first deep learning-based dual watermarking technique proposed in the literature.